Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave, is out for preorder now.

I've been working on this for 25 years. It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior. Please check be your welcome for the next hour. Guys, we're doing something we've never been done before in the show, which is I'm often sent books in the mail. I have never before gotten a book in the mail, and honestly, by the way, I didn't know who sent it, and gotten the author on the show because I was so excited to talk to Noah Rothman about his new book, Blood in Progress, A Century of Left Wing Violence in America. Noah, I want to thank you and commend you for writing this. I am not a senior writer at National View. I am not a conservable any means, but I can make the case for conservatism very easily, which is and correct me at the end if you disagree. Human beings and human nature has not changed very much since the days of Pharaoh. It is incumbent on all of us to study the lessons of history and apply them to today, and that there are certain universal truths that apply across cultures and across time. And much of our social problems come when people ignore this and think they can reinvent man and ignore what Thomas Sol calls the constrained vision of humanity, that it's quite finite what we can tweak and move. And if you try to break that box, carnage follows. How'd I do? I think that's fantastic. That's not only a foundational premise of conservatism. It's a foundational premise of the country. Yeah, that's right. The founders believed and approached human nature as though it was immutable and flawed. So they designed a series of constructions to channel mankind's flawed nature in productive ways, which conflicts with the revolutionary tradition subsequently, the French revolutionary tradition, Russian revolutionary tradition, et cetera, all of them tried to remake human nature and start to surround your zero mentality, which explains why those revolutions also failed. So yes, applaud that definition. I am also bothered and I suspect you are as well that maybe not as vocally as I am, by how often conservatives forget this, especially online. And I hear this perpetual, the left has gone crazy 20 years ago. I remember vividly that Biden was both a Marxist and the worst present American history to claims you cannot make with a straight face if you have any knowledge of what happened before. So while I was really excited about this book instead of it being like conservative Pablo and Red Meat, you're like, guys, this isn't new. This is part of a long tradition in America. You're not going to really expect the New York Times to tell you about it. President Clinton, for example, pardoned people who bombed was at the Capitol. I mean, explicit terrorists or commuted wherever the thing he did. I don't know what it was, but it was something not nice. But there's this kind of idea that like Charlie Kirk, which was horrific, of course, this had never happened before. And it's like, this was a pattern. So please educate people about how this is not some kind of phenomenon that happened yesterday. Yeah, well, I feel like so much of our debate around political violence in this country is predicated on ignorance and sort of a cultivated ignorance, especially from our institutions that have a responsibility

and a duty to inform you about sort of basic history so that we don't relive it.

And they failed so much in that charge that we are reliving it.

You hear consistently about how the American right is uniquely violent and especially violent

threat to the American social compact.

Why do you hear about it so often?

Because it's become a rejoinder to episodes

of obvious objective left-wing violence, the assassination or attempted assassination of a right-wing political figure, shooting at an ICE or CBP facility. The mobs at the send on cities almost nightly, and the euro is told, well, you don't have to worry about that, right? Because it's mostly the right. That's a reflex. And it's a permission structure

that allows mainstream institutions and left wingers to avoid confronting the violence that is on their side. And there's plenty of it, not just in our era, but as I write in this book, subsequent previous era's waves of political violence from the left in the 1910s and 20s, the 1970s and 80s. And today it tends to come in these 50 year periods partly because I think we don't have any immunity to the initial indications that we're about to face another left wave of left wing violence. They're just unstudied and my book describes why it's unstudied. It's not really a conspiracy per se, but it is a set of shared interests in the in academics and media and politics that have conspired to ensure that we don't really carefully examine these

waves of left-wing violence when they crest and receive which leaves us destined to experience them again. I'm reminded and I would bet money I haven't looked at the quoted in the book when AOC was saying that riots are the sound of the voice of the unheard. The weathermen who there's this book called Days of Rage. I'm assuming you read this as reference for this book. Yeah. Yeah, there were bombings with like every other day in America in the late 60s, early 70s. There's a group called the weathermen Bill Ayers, who's now a professor somewhere, was Obama's mentor. So not only is the violence not discussed in terms of, oh my God, this is awful, the people who perpetrated are valorized and valorized at the highest levels within academia and the Democratic Party, Angel Davis being another prominent example. Yeah, it's become a little ghost, I suppose, to acknowledge that the president of the United States, the 44th president of the United States, launched his political career in the living room, an unrepentant domestic American terrorist. But it's the truth, even though it's really discomforting to a lot of people who don't want to be reminded of that fact. I mean, you could go to the cults that attend around some of the 1960s, 1970s militants like Assad Shakor, who was involved in a police shooting on the side of a New Jersey highway prior to that, robbed churches, robbed gangsters in order to fund the illicit activities of the Black Liberation Army, which targeted police officers for death as a routine doctrinal approach to political radicalism. She died by, and comfortably by all accounts last year in exile from American justice, a fugitive rather from American justice in exile in Communist Cuba. But there's a cult of personality around her too that the left occupates on college campuses, for example. There are buildings that are named after her. Her works are studied probably without a lot of the scrutiny that should be applied to them. There's a whole cult of martyrdom and heroism around practitioners of what we would probably recognize as more or less criminal violence, although it's tinged with an ideologically revolutionary element to it, which lends more gravity and righteousness to what we would otherwise recognize as just bloodshed and political violence. But that's just one of the cults around the Marxian guerrilla movements of the 1960s and 1970s. And we don't even really know anything. I did barely knew anything. I knew about the 1920 Wall Street bombing from the Socialistic and Archistic Italian anarchist movement of the 1910s and 1920s. But I didn't know about anywhere near the amount of bombings that we experienced from that organization, the attacks on law enforcement, many of the murderous, the efforts to decapitate American industry twice. In Chicago, there was a mass poisoning attempt that was targeting political officials, governors, mayors, heads of clergy, heads of industry. The Gimbles Brothers bombing similarly attacked, sought to murder the heads of American state in the federal government, state level government, industrialists, what have you. Some of these were very close to being extremely successful terrorist operations. And they just receded into memory, have been lost to posterity. Indeed, all of the errors that are chronicle,

the 1910s anarchist wave, the nationalist wave, the Puerto Rican nationalist wave of the 1950s, which has conspicuous links to Moscow and the KGB. And the Marxian guerrilla movements of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, all the scholars who study this stuff say it's been forgotten. But why has it been forgotten? How has it been forgotten? and whose interests are served by that forgetting.

All these questions are attempt to answer in blood and progress. That Wall Street bombing you mentioned from the 1920s, which was I think the biggest terrorist attack in New York until 9-11, for people to strip your question, you could still see the shrapnel on the building if you go down to Wall Street.

It was this huge kind of historic. Right across from the stock market and the House of Morgan. Yeah, the 80th Morgan's building. It's really those pop marks. But it's what's interesting. So behind me is Emma Goldman on the cover of my book, The White Pill. One of the reasons I wrote The White Pill, which is about the rise of all the Soviet Union, was kind of my shock at how ignorant most conservatives are about the nature of the Soviet Union, how glorious that victory was. But one reason I wanted to have you on is, I think it's very important when people have a point of view to be able to steal man the other side so you know you know the issue inside and out. What is your, as someone who did organize the anarchist handbook, what is your perspective on political violence? Is it never acceptable? Extralegal political violence is in my view never acceptable. In a country that is free with a constitutional order and where we have conflict resolution mechanisms like the courts, which are legitimate and legitimate as defined by our capacity to influence them through the political process to the electoral process, which is unadulterated, contrary to what the activist class may tell itself. All these mechanisms are still available to the citizenry. So no, I do not believe that there is a justification for revolutionary violence, extra legal violence in this country. And therefore, I take a blanket view that it's bad and wrong and a threat to the social covenant. And I also, one of the arguments that I make in this book, right up front, is that the American political class, the institutions in this country, don't need to be reminded of the necessity of scanning the horizon for incidents of right-wing violence. Whenever right-wing violence happens, we're treated to prolonged lectures. Now, why it's horrible, how we let this happen, who failed us, and why the social project is, is imperiled by those sorts of activities. And we should be. That's good. But what we don't get is symmetry when there's episodes of violence on the left. We get efforts to excuse it, explain it away, pretend as though the right is much more violent than the left and therefore we don't actually have to contend with this phenomenon. And until you get your hands around it or until you acknowledge both sides of this equation, you'll never get your hands around it because if you listen to what people who execute

extra legal, terrorist, political violence say, when they're talking to one another, they justify it as meeting out vendetta vengeance against their political adversaries, which sometimes includes violent people on the other side of the spectrum, almost always includes the state and the instruments of the state like the police because they activists on both sides of this thing I think the state is a rate against them.

So they always take inspiration from one another,

and therefore if you're only looking at... the state and the instruments of the state like the police because they active us on both sides of this thing think the state is a rate against them. So they always take inspiration from one

another and therefore if you're only looking at one side of the equation you're never going to

comprehend it and that's why we have institutions in this country that seem incapable of comprehending

political violence. Some of this by the way is not as organic as you as I'm leading you to believe

probably with my very nonjudgmental approach to this thing is trying to steal man this argument. There are also, as I describe in this book, two phenomenon that give the left permission to look the other way when there's side commits violence. One is this phenomenon in which there are a bunch of databases that purport to break down incidences of political violence in this country and quantify it so that that you have an at a glance idea of who's the problem here. And most of them maintain that the right is if not uniquely violent, uniquely murderous. When you go into those databases though, the actual incidences do not seem to comport with what people really think of when they're thinking of political violence. Some of them maintain and domestic political violence in this country peaked in 2019, which should leave you skeptical. Others contend that episodes that involve gang violence, prison violence, intra family violence. That's coded as right wing violence too, and it's just not. It's like when anti-gun groups, and there's an analogy that I use, it's like when anti-gun groups say,

well, there have been 75 school shootings this year,

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